 I'm curious of your thoughts on why stoicism is so attractive to so many people in the culture and not like the original Roman sense of stoicism, but the way it's been popularized by people like Ryan Holiday, Jordan Peterson, the way Lex Friedman talks about it. What are your thoughts on it? You know, why do you think it has, especially with young men, why do you think stoicism really has this hook and this attraction for so many people? Yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert on this. I'll have to bring Aaron from the Institute on Smith, who has written about stoicism and has read a bunch of stoicism and what happened on the show, and then you guys can grill him on stoicism. So I'll just speculate. So I think there's a real, there's some understanding among people like Jordan Peterson and Lex and others that the culture has become emotionalist, that it's become hysterical. And you know, I think the whole cancel culture woke, but even before that, the safe spaces, snowflakes, all of that that's been going on now what six, seven, eight years since the early teens, I think it's really become a big deal. We've been talking about it for a long time. So the culture is clearly in our educational system encourages this, it's clearly become very emotionalistic. And so they're looking to counter emotionalism without completely giving up on spiritual values, if you will, right? So without becoming rationalists, or the perception of rationalists, so without becoming a Descartes type of, you know, or without advocating for some kind of overt repression of emotions. So their solution is to challenge their emotions into this other avenue for Jordan Peterson. It's a kind of religion. It's a kind of religion, but not exactly religion. So I think it's, socialism appeals to them because it's non-emotionalistic. It has a semblance of reason and rationality, but not as we understand it. And it's not completely repressive, although it does have a repressive aspect to it. And then, yeah, and the other important aspect, and I think Ben addressed this yesterday in the Q&A about socialism, is that it's not that challenging. So you can still be an altruist, you can still be a Christian, you can still be, it's not asking you to give anything really important up, except don't just be a bubbling, you know, a bundle of emotions, right? So you can still adhere to all the same moral code that you had before, and even the same mysticism you had before. Now it's just asking you to be a little bit more distant from your emotions, to hold them in check, you know, and to try to be a little bit more quote rational, to observe things in a more, from a distance without taking, without jumping to conclusions and jumping to sides and getting excited. And this is the appeal. What is it appeal to young men? It appeals to young men primarily because they're not emotionalists. They're repressed. Young men in our culture are repressed, super repressed. We teach them to be repressed. We teach them to be passive. This has to do with the shootings, I think, and the whole attitude towards men that we have in the culture, towards boys in particular we have in the culture. We try to get them to be emotional, but it doesn't, it doesn't, they don't buy it so they repress the emotions. But they think emotions are really, really important, but they repress them. They, you know, they're confused. They're surrounded by emotionalism around them, particularly, you know, particularly among women who they don't understand and they don't know what to do with. I mean, and again, not so much young women, right? They're the same boys, girls, kind of, because the girls embrace the emotionalism that they're being taught. They embrace that because they're more open to that. Men have this conflict. You're supposed to be emotional, but you're supposed to be a man, and, you know, which means repressed, so they've got this conflict. I think men are much more confused than this young men are much more confused in the culture today than women are. It doesn't mean women are right. It just means they're less confused. It's much easier for them in some way to buy into the BS that they're being taught that with men. So men are confused. Men are more angry. There's greater demand for them to go against their nature. Okay, so I'm going to say some stuff that I might get in trouble with, but anyway, you know, we treat boys really, really badly. And there's a difference between boys and girls. I'm sorry, but when you're growing up, you can see it. You can see young kids in the playground, and there's a difference between boys and girls. And some girls do this, but most girls don't. Boys are supposed to run around, bump into each other, get into a fight once in a while, get into the mud, get dirty. It's part of growing up is being out there, engaging with reality, with the soil, with physical reality. I think girls are much better at, much more self-contained and much better at dealing without having to go, growing up without having to go out there and actually climb trees and throw rocks and do stuff like that. I don't know why. I don't have an explanation of why, but that's my general sense of it. I mean, it has to do with, I think, grand's view of femininity and masculinity. And men tend to be more masculine and female tend to be more feminine, but not always and not at the ages and not every woman, and not every man, right, so the variations. And then we restrain men and we tell them they can't do that. They're not supposed to do that. And we treat them like they should be more feminine. And we restrain them and you add to that in an educational system that can't teach and then emphasize the emotions of a reason and which is hurting both men and women. But I think ultimately creates more anger and resentment and hatred among men. And that's why you see men go out and shoot in schools, not just shoot people, but shoot in schools. And I think it's why men are looking, these young men are looking for something that desperately in search of answers because they're conflicted. They're unhappy. They're much more distressed than it seems the women are. And that's why I think you find men engaged much more in a search for answers, intellectual answers. Women are much more comfortable in the world in which we live than men are just generally. And therefore, so if you look at intellectual movements, the particularly radical intellectual movements that dominate by men, because men are constantly in search of, today men are constantly in search of something. And I think women are more comfortable partially because for so long, women were oppressed. And there's a certain liberty now, they have the freedom and they go, you know, that it's not as urgent it is for men who feel like something's changed for them in a negative sense. For women, the change over the last 100 years has mostly been positive in terms of their ability to live their life. I don't know. So that's my somewhat rambling thoughts about all of that. Thank you. Not organized as well as Alex's book. But it is, it's a fascinating issue. It would be interesting to get a psychologist to talk about it. And, and then stoicism, I'll definitely have Aaron Smith on because obviously, stoicism is so prevalent today, particularly in Silicon Valley. Yeah, I think the thing that really jumped out of me, I mean, you know, it is something that's everywhere. And I think there is that superficial masculinity about it that men, you know, we don't show our feelings. But what really kind of made like a linkage for me is when I'm one of his shows, Lex Fridman talks about the phrase, you know, this too shall pass. But he talked about specifically in the context of good things as well as bad things. And that's when I hit home to like, stoicism is the denial of positive emotions as well as negative ones. I'm a very emotional, passionate person. It's like, you know, I don't want to give up those, those massive highs and the aggression and, you know, how I feel at sports games, that sort of thing. It seems like you're losing a lot for a relatively small benefit of not having those negative things. So that's what really made it click for me. Absolutely. And, you know, that's absolutely right. And look, it links into Jordan Peterson's whole view that emotions like happiness is accidental. It's random. It's not caused by particular behaviors. And if you have it, you know, great, but don't expect it. Because, you know, most people are never happy. And that's a state of nature. That's the state of the world. So be a man, accept the fact that you're never going to be happy and just suck it up and repress those emotions, the negative emotions and the positive emotions, they're not going to happen anyways or what the hell, right? So it really is all about sucking it up and being a man. And I think, to some extent, they use that terminology. And again, they're hooking into something real about men. But it is a distortion and a perversion at the same time. And young men really, really feel it. And it's horrible. And I think that's why nihilism is so much more prevalent among young men and among young women.